Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed Collection

Sonic Racing is the SEGA equivalent of Mario Kart (MK). This game has different characters you can race with and you can drift to get a speed-boost. You can get random items that allow you to slow down your opponents or give yourself a boost and the maps have dynamically changing obstacles for each lap of the race. Finally, most races take place in land, sea and air. In this game, your character impacts the tuning of the vehicle (speed, handling, acceleration, abilities). As you level up your characters, you begin to unlock more mods that lets you change the tuning of your vehicle. Each character has to be levelled up individually through gameplay. This game is basically identical with the older versions of Mario Kart, you can do time trials but there aren't versus modes in Sonic such as the Balloon Battles which I think were a fun addition to Mario Kart. Bear in mind when this game was released. My favourite part about this game are the maps. The maps are significantly more dynamic than MK Wii or MK DS. The first lap is like an introduction to the route. The second lap introduces obstacles that force you to adapt your driving. The final lap makes the obstacles even trickier. At the same time, different stages of the race force you to switch between road, water and air racing. These sections also change with each lap, and they add an extra dimension to the race that keeps every round fresh and exciting. The maps are slightly more sophisticated than the maps in MK; sometimes you don't know what is around the corner and this makes the game slightly more thrilling as you have to play reactively when it is your first time playing the game. Flying in the air changes your Kart into a mini jetplane-car hybrid. The flying is really fluid and comfortable, and these sections feel very wide and open. They are rather simple compared with land racing because the air sections have less obstacles in some maps, but some maps do it excellent and it feels like you're the millenium falcon in Star Wars. Flying in this game is actual flying, not gliding like in Mario Kart, which lets players go further while in the air. Water turns your car into a jet-ski. These sections are tricker than land racing because you have the same amount of obstacles as on land, but the jet-skis (understandably) have worse handling than a car would have. This adds another layer of challenge to the race as it forces the player to adapt their play style so they don't crash into obstacles or drive too carefully and fall behind their opponents. This game has amazing graphics for an early 2010's game, better than Mario Kart, but this also necessitates slightly better hardware to handle the game, which may make the game less accessible to some players. The game gives minimal graphics configuration in spite of the previous fact, so you don't have much choice on reducing the performance requirements to successfully play the game. If you are on Windows 10 or later, you may struggle to launch the game. You need to open the game folder in your file explorer, right click and enable Windows 8 compatibility mode for both the launcher and the game. If it still doesn't work, you may need to press launch a second time. Try running the game again, press yes on the Steam Client pop-up and it should suddenly work. If you're a fan of Mario Kart, and you have a good PC, you will enjoy this game as well because it is basically identical with the older Mario Kart titles of the DS and Wii era.